Death Row prisoner challenges conviction
The lawyer for a man sentenced to death for fatally shooting a Sonoma County sheriff ’s deputy in 1995, five days after being released from prison, told the state Supreme Court on Tuesday that his trial should have been transferred elsewhere because the county was “saturated” with coverage of the menacing killer and his heroic victim.
Robert Lee Scully “could not have gotten and did not in fact get a fair trial in Sonoma County” which still “felt itself under siege” when trial proceedings began a year and a half later, attorney Valerie Hriciga of the state public defender’s office told the court, which heard an hour of arguments remotely from its headquarters in San Francisco.
Extensive news coverage portrayed Scully as a white supremacist, recounted his criminal record, described an “executionstyle slaying,” and depicted the defendant as “a threat to (the) community,” Hriciga said. She said the deputy, Frank Trejo, was described in media accounts, justifiably, as a “fallen hero.”
Scully’s trial lawyers said a pretrial survey found that 85% of county residents were aware of the case, and, of that number, 78% thought Scully was definitely or probably guilty. But Deputy Attorney General Julie Je told the court that the furor had subsided by the time of the trial.
Potential jurors “are not expected to be totally ignorant of the facts of the case,” Je said. “Even pervasive adverse publicity does not inevitably lead to an unfair trial,” and the trial judge properly found that the jury had been adequately screened for bias.
Scully was 37 when he was freed from maximumsecurity Pelican Bay State Prison in March 1995 after serving 11 years for robbery convictions in San Diego. A friend, Brenda Moore, was driving him in her pickup truck toward San
Diego, where he was due to meet with his parole officer, but she changed her mind after a stop in Sonoma County and decided to return home. They were arguing when Trejo, 58, pulled up on a road about a mile east of Sebastopol.
Scully, who was carrying a shotgun, disarmed the deputy, forced him to lie on the ground and shot him in the head. Scully later testified that the gun had discharged accidentally when he stumbled while walking backward. But a jury found he had intentionally killed the deputy, and he was sentenced to death in June 1997.
While his lawyers still contend the killing was not intentional and should not have been a capital crime, the central issue in Scully’s appeal is Superior Court Judge Elaine Watters’ refusal to transfer the trial to another county. Watters found in two pretrial rulings that the local coverage of the case, although extensive, was not inflammatory or sensational, and that Scully’s public unpopularity was “universal” and not confined to Sonoma County.
Arguing that the court should overturn Scully’s convictions and death sentence and order a new trial, Hriciga said Tuesday that pretrial questioning of prospective jurors showed they were still swayed by the emotional impact of the killing.
“Families no longer felt secure in their homes,” the defense lawyer said. She said one prospective juror had watched Trejo’s memorial service on television, others told Watters they passed by a memorial to the deputy twice a day, and a juror in the case told the judge that Scully was assumed to be guilty.
But Justice Martin Jenkins noted that jurors told the judge they could set their beliefs aside. Justice Teri Jackson of the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco, temporarily assigned to the state’s high court for the case, observed that Scully’s trial lawyer had allowed the jury to be seated without using all of his allotted challenges. Hriciga replied that the lawyer had seen other prospective jurors’ written responses to pretrial questions and concluded they would be even less sympathetic than those already seated.
A ruling in People vs. Scully, S062259, is due within 90 days.